Naples ’44

Place · Landmark

Hotel Vesuvio (Benevento)

In the book

The damaged, stripped-out hotel where Lewis lodges during the Benevento posting.

Appears in 4 diary entries.

  1. August 18 1944
    Lewis settles into a stripped-down, damaged hotel in Benevento, comically failing to avoid the pasta he'd meant to forgo in favor of rations.
  2. August 30 1944
    Lewis races to Naples to fetch medicine for an ailing friend, discovering along the way a black-market pharmacy relabeling stolen drugs.
  3. September 1 1944
    The newly-arrived Canadian soldiers prove restless, undisciplined, and utterly disconnected from the war and the local population around them.
  4. September 23 1944
    Lewis realizes with unease that locals now regard him as a possible *jettatore* (bearer of the evil eye), noting superstitious gestures made in his presence. He then reflects that a year after liberation, still hungry and diseased amid lawless ruins with only the distant promise of corrupt democracy ahead, Neapolitans may reasonably look back on the Mussolini years as a lost paradise by comparison.

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